For Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, anger is the most useful emotion. Anger was what motivated her to write for newspapers as a teen-ager and to make documentary films as an adult, and it is the reaction she habitually tries to provoke in audiences. Even when she is on camera, she cannot resist interrupting her own narration to register outrage at a particular injustice. Obaid-Chinoy is the best-known documentary filmmaker in Pakistan. Her films, which have won two Oscars and three Emmys, range from reportage on xenophobia in South Africa to an inquiry into the ethics of honor killings in Pakistan. “Anger is necessary for people to go beyond not liking what they see,” she said. “I need enough people who watch my stuff to be moved, and to be angry, and to do something about it.”

On a recent afternoon in Karachi, where Obaid-Chinoy lives, she visited a girls’ school in Shireen Jinnah Colony, a slum, to talk to students and to show some of her films. A volunteer administrator at the school, Tanvir Khwaja, her head covered with a pink dupatta, welcomed Obaid-Chinoy into a vast auditorium decorated with silver and green stars, where rows of eager girls in lilac-hued hijabs sat whispering. Some were as young as eight, while others were in their last year of secondary school. Khwaja had warned Obaid-Chinoy that most of the girls came from a “very, very conservative background.”

Obaid-Chinoy, who is thirty-nine, wore a black shalwar kameez; her dark hair, streaked with gray, was pinned back. She is a natural reporter, watchful and carefully expressive, with a heightened impulse to gauge her companion’s mood; she has a habit of smiling quickly to offer reassurance during an uneasy silence. She is also unabashedly confident: at a party in Islamabad, I saw her tell a male guest, within moments of meeting him, that she was an Oscar winner. Soon afterward, she challenged another man, a politician, about his views on China’s business dealings with Pakistan. The politician smiled tightly and congratulated her on having her film about honor killings screened at the Prime Minister’s office. It was a shame, he added, that it showed the country in such a negative light.

Obaid-Chinoy is accustomed to this kind of mixed reaction to her work. Her critics in Pakistan have suggested that her films stoke outrage by confirming the prejudices of Western audiences. Obaid-Chinoy argues that these critics, many of whom are male, are in fact reacting against her own power as a woman, and against the misogyny she is exposing. The position of women in Pakistani society has been disputed since the country was established, in 1947. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s vision for the republic involved a separation of religion and politics, the equality of all Pakistanis, and the nurturing of an intelligentsia. He spoke out against “the curse of provincialism,” and said in a speech, “It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners.” In the decades since Jinnah’s death, in 1948, those in power, most notably General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who ruled from 1977 to 1988, have eroded women’s rights, often in efforts to enforce a conservative, Islamic ideology. Although many Pakistani women attend college and pursue careers in the arts, law, and politics, they also face an entrenched patriarchy that dictates their choices when it comes to schooling, work, marriage, and self-presentation. Poor women have even less freedom. More than half of Pakistani women are illiterate, and many suffer domestic violence. They struggle to have their legal rights upheld, and face accusations of bringing dishonor upon their families if they report a rape or file for a divorce. Through her work, Obaid-Chinoy believes, she is combatting men’s power to define women’s lives.

Obaid-Chinoy listened as Khwaja introduced her as “the daughter of our country,” then walked to a lectern onstage, smiling brightly. “When I turned twenty-one, I made my first film, and I always wanted to move forward the vision of Muhammad Ali Jinnah,” she said. “Does anyone here know what he spoke about women?” Shouts came from the audience. “Exactly,” she said. “Pakistan cannot progress without women.

“What can a woman do here in Pakistan? Can anyone tell me? Can she be a Prime Minister?” The girls shouted affirmation. “Can she be a doctor? Yes. Can she be a lawyer? Yes. Can she become a politician? Yes. So it means that women can do anything in Pakistan. Yes? Yes. Good. Among you, what do you want to do?”

A girl called out that she wanted to become a doctor.

“You will cure yourself and the others. Very good!” Obaid-Chinoy said. “And what about the others? Everyone here wants to be a doctor? Doesn’t anyone want to become a lawyer? Don’t you want to go in the business field?” The girls squirmed, giggling.

Obaid-Chinoy’s documentaries have tackled difficult issues like child sexual abuse and rape but have also taken as their subjects people who embody social progress—a female doctor who runs addiction clinics, a young advocate for girls’ education. The didactic tone of her work is most evident in the programs she has made for Pakistani television. The films for which she is best known outside Pakistan, and for which she received international funding, are more intimate, driven by personal narratives. Occasionally, Obaid-Chinoy has refrained from having these documentaries aired on Pakistani television in order to protect her subjects, who fear reprisal. In any case, she told me, “we don’t have a culture of watching such documentaries here. It’s not just my films, it’s everyone’s.”

She is cognizant of what different audiences will sit through, and thinks deeply about the balance between informing viewers and disturbing them. This afternoon, she was aiming for a feeling of uplift—she wanted to make her audience ask, “What are the things girls can achieve?” She played two of her short films for the students, one about a girls’ boxing club and the other about an all-female antiterrorism force, the Elite Commandos of Nowshera. The girls were rapt, cheering for the boxers and breaking into applause when the commandos, in hijab and body armor, practiced firing a rocket launcher. Afterward, Obaid-Chinoy told me, “You see how careful I have to be when I go to these things. It’s always a fine dance. Some of these girls must be so brainwashed—I didn’t want to show them misery. They already see it in their lives.”

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When Obaid-Chinoy was eleven, she pleaded with her father to allow her to attend Karachi Grammar School, in Saddar, the heart of the city. “No girls in our family go to coed schools,” he told her, but eventually she wore him down. She is the eldest of six children, five girls and one boy; her brother is the youngest. “My father was always on the elusive chase for a son,” she said. Her parents believed that girls should be educated and permitted to work, but they were also strict. Until Sharmeen left for college, she had to be home by nightfall.

Her maternal grandparents moved from India to Karachi shortly after Partition, inspired by Jinnah’s democratic vision. Her father’s parents migrated from India to Bangladesh, which was then East Pakistan, in 1947, and then, in 1971, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, fled to Karachi. Her grandfather worked for a shipping company. Sharmeen’s father, Sheikh Obaid, began a textile firm, and the family lived in a spacious house in Defence, a wealthy enclave for the élite. Sheikh, who died in 2010, was a loud, warm man with a ribald sense of humor, and he and Sharmeen’s mother, Saba, frequently hosted business guests. Sharmeen and her siblings were accustomed to sitting down to dinners with buyers from Europe, Asia, and North America, and the family accompanied him on trips to the United States. Sharmeen grew up swimming at her parents’ sports club and competing in tennis tournaments. On Sundays, if her father was not travelling, the family drove around the city to try new eateries.

One morning, as a driver took Sharmeen to school, they stopped at a traffic light, and a young girl pressed herself against the window, begging for money. “She had the most beautiful eyes, and wispy hair in front and a little bit of dirt on her,” Obaid-Chinoy recalled. “Her hand was just stretched. She didn’t ever say anything.” For the first time, Sharmeen realized that the comforts she had always taken for granted were uncommon in Karachi. “I was sort of an angry child,” she told me. “I asked my parents a lot of questions about things I saw around me and things that I read.”

At home, she grew increasingly upset about the place of women in society. “I would often hear from my extended family, ‘So-and-So couldn’t finish her studies and was married off,’ ” she said. A girl in her neighborhood play group was engaged at sixteen and had a child less than two years later. “I realized that we accept things for women because that’s just the way they are,” Obaid-Chinoy said. “It made me question what my rights are, and what I will be ‘allowed’ to do. And that became such a troubled word for me. Why should I be ‘allowed’ to do something? Shouldn’t it just be taken for granted that I would be studying, or going to work?” One afternoon in the family’s kitchen, a female relative told Saba that she was unlucky to have so many girls. Obaid-Chinoy retorted that her mother was actually very lucky; her mother quickly removed her from the room. Obaid-Chinoy’s classmate and friend Masoomeh Hilal recalled, “If anyone messed with us, she would be the first one to stick up for her friends. And she was extremely focussed. If there was something she wanted to do, she would find a way to do it.”

Saba, a quiet, intelligent woman, had wanted to be a journalist, but she married at seventeen and stayed home to care for the children. When Sharmeen was fourteen, Saba suggested that she channel her outrage into writing for local newspapers. Saba’s uncle, who worked as a journalist at the News, encouraged Sharmeen to write opinion pieces about the rights of girls to go to school and of citizens to vote; later, she wrote investigative pieces for the newspaper Dawn. Obaid-Chinoy recalled one article about a government office that sold passports to Afghan refugees, and another about students who smoked weed—a taboo subject that shocked the parents. Obaid-Chinoy’s most memorable story was about the sons of wealthy feudal lords at schools in Karachi who ran a bullying ring: they went to parties with guns and, if they weren’t allowed inside, fired them into the air. They would beat up students, tear their clothes, drive them around for hours, and shave their heads before releasing them. “I went undercover and named and shamed them,” Obaid-Chinoy said. The morning the article came out, her father shouted for her to come downstairs. Her family’s name, interspersed with profanities, had been spray-painted across their front gate and down the street for blocks, presumably by the boys she had written about. Obaid-Chinoy was energized. Her father, she recalled, told her, “Amplify that voice. Speak the truth, and I will stand with you.”

Students at Obaid-Chinoy’s high school often went to college abroad, but her father insisted that she stay in Pakistan. She ended up at Greenwich University, in Karachi. “Boy, did I make the lives of my teachers hell,” she said. “I was always challenging them. I just wanted out.” Two years later, she applied to Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke, among other colleges in the United States, hoping that her father would at least allow her to attend a single-sex school. He still resisted, though, so she went on a “hunger strike.” “For forty-eight hours, I pretended not to eat,” she recalled. He relented, and Obaid-Chinoy transferred to Smith College, where she majored in economics and government. (“My father called me every single day,” she said, laughing.) After graduating, she had planned to work for the United Nations, but her priorities shifted during her senior year, after the 9/11 attacks. “Suddenly, everyone was an expert on Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Obaid-Chinoy said. With Westerners newly interested in Pakistan, she saw an opening. “The idea was to bring stories from there to here,” she said.

On a trip to Karachi in 2001, during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Obaid-Chinoy noticed Afghan refugee children living on the streets. She felt sure that images of them would make an immediate impression on Western audiences. “I didn’t know how to use a camera,” she said. But she did know how to use an audio recorder, and on her next trip she conducted interviews, which became part of a proposal for a documentary film. She sent it to eighty organizations, without success. In April, 2002, a few weeks before graduating, she sent an unsolicited pitch to the president of the television production company at the Times, William Abrams. He responded within minutes, inviting her to meet. Obaid-Chinoy bought her first suit and went to New York. Ann Derry, who was the head of editorial programming at NYT Television, recalled, “She had no experience as a filmmaker, but she had amazing access, and she was so persuasive.”

With funding from the Times and from Smith College, Obaid-Chinoy returned to Karachi that summer and put together a production team; her partner was a schoolmate, Mohammad Ali Naqvi, who had taken film classes at the University of Pennsylvania. Derry encouraged Obaid-Chinoy to film a nightly video diary, which they later used to provide narration. “She had an incredible sense of character and compassion,” Derry said. (Derry also recalled that the sound in the earliest footage was garbled and the film had to be reshot.) The film, “Terror’s Children,” about Afghan refugee children scavenging and begging in Karachi, won an Overseas Press Club award.

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Between 2002 and 2009, Obaid-Chinoy made a series of films tackling such subjects as the limited freedoms of women in Saudi Arabia, the Taliban’s growing influence in Pakistan, the rape and murder of Aboriginal women in Canada, and illegal abortion in the Philippines. These films had the feel of prime-time news reports, animated less by narrative or aesthetic appeal than by Obaid-Chinoy’s charismatic presence onscreen. In “Reinventing the Taliban?,” made in 2003, she walks through Peshawar as men stare in curiosity. “I’m probably the only woman around,” she announces while exploring a rough neighborhood. At one point, she tries on a burqa—“My God, you can’t even breathe in here,” she says—and enters a local college, where she criticizes the Taliban before a group of men praising the militants. “Is the whole world wrong when they say that the Taliban regime is repressive?” she asks one man. “They used Islam as a front for their own ideas of what’s right and wrong.”

For Obaid-Chinoy, the Taliban represented a betrayal of national possibility. “There was a lot of anger during those interviews,” she said, referring to her conversations with members and supporters of the Taliban. “It almost felt like I was watching how these people wanted to destroy the Pakistan I grew up in. It was my way to unmask them.”

Ed Robbins, who worked with Obaid-Chinoy on “Reinventing the Taliban?,” recalled that, on one shoot, an “open truck filled with guys carrying guns went by as she crossed the street, and all of them started shooting their guns in the air.” She was fearless, he said. She hadn’t told her dad where they were going, and when he eventually found out he sent a security guard to accompany them. “She knows how to be deferential to some of these older men, but yet still be very forceful,” Robbins said. “She has an easy laugh and is very charming, so they become intrigued with her. She’ll have her hands up and start yelling at some big dude. If someone is being rude or something, she will not hold back.”

In the film, Obaid-Chinoy interviews a Taliban supporter named Khurshid Alam.

“The Taliban were good people,” Alam says. “Someone just misinformed you about them.”

“Maybe they were good people, but what they did to women was wrong,” Obaid-Chinoy responds.

“I guess it was a little wrong,” Alam concedes.

“Thank God you agree with me,” Obaid-Chinoy says.

Alam demurs. “I agreed with you so that you would not get angry with me, not because I actually agree with you,” he says.

Obaid-Chinoy described her presence in her first thirteen films as “accidental,” an artifact of the diaristic approach of “Terror’s Children.” But, she noted, “being emotionally involved was important for my stories. You can tell when I’m upset. You can tell how my voice changes depending on who I’m talking to. It was a quality that I could exploit to get stories from people, because of the connections I formed. I understood the nuances of the language.” The first-person format soon revealed its limitations, however. “In the early years, it was the emotions that pushed my journalism, but a lot of time the stories became about me, about what I was experiencing,” she said. She began to recognize the value of finding the right characters. “You can have the best story in the world, but if you cannot eloquently convey it you cannot draw people in,” she said. “If your smile is infectious—those are the people I like, because I know when people watch them they will be moved by the issues that we are trying to talk about.”

One afternoon, Obaid-Chinoy visited an addiction clinic in Peshawar. Although it was situated in an alley off a busy main road, it was a serene place, with intricately tiled floors and an airy courtyard. In an empty office, she set up an audio recorder to interview a former patient of the clinic, a man in his fifties who now worked as a counsellor. Tall and thin, with a kind face, he told her that he had aspired to be a doctor, until, he said, “on the day of my wedding a friend gave me a cigarette with heroin in it.” As Obaid-Chinoy gently asked questions, he spoke with growing emotion. Every time his colleagues and relatives sent him to rehab, he relapsed. He got into debt, and ended up living on a riverbank with other addicts, fleeing across the water whenever the police showed up; some of his friends had drowned in the periodic raids, he said. I was writing notes when I noticed Obaid-Chinoy bouncing in her seat, trying to get my attention. She tilted her head toward her subject, her eyes wide, to direct my gaze: she had got him to cry.

Obaid-Chinoy is adept at coaxing people to share their stories. “When women in Pakistan speak about personal matters like honor killing and rape, it’s hard for them, because a lot has to do with family honor,” Aleeha Badat, a producer who has worked with Obaid-Chinoy, told me. “They don’t even get permission to come and speak on camera, because their families just don’t allow it. But she has a way of making you feel safe, and like whatever we’re doing is for your benefit.” The message Obaid-Chinoy tried to convey, Badat went on, was: “Yes, you’ve been through a horrific experience, but that doesn’t mean your life is over. With your help, we can do something about it and stand up to the men in your life.”

“Saving Face,” for which Obaid-Chinoy and Daniel Junge, her co-director, won an Oscar in 2012, is the first of her documentaries in which she does not appear onscreen. The film follows Mohammed Jawad, a plastic surgeon who treats women who have been disfigured by acid attacks. (According to Pakistan’s human-rights commission, there had been hundreds of such attacks in the previous five years, many of them perpetrated by men against current and former wives and lovers.) The acid-attack victims belong mostly to the lower class, as distant from Obaid-Chinoy’s experience as the girl begging at the car window, but she creates an intimacy with them and their families. The rage is still there, however muted. During filming, the husband of one victim maintained that most of the women in the burn unit had inflicted their own injuries. Obaid-Chinoy recalled, “The cameraman was telling me, ‘Please breathe, please breathe.’ ”

Her next major documentary, “A Girl in the River,” released in 2015, investigated the case of a young Punjabi woman whose father shot her in the head and then, with her uncle, dumped her in a river, because she had eloped with a man of whom they did not approve. In the previous three years, there had been more than two thousand honor killings in Pakistan, most of which went unpunished. The woman, whose name was Saba, survived, and began telling her story, talking first to a local news outlet and to the BBC and then to Obaid-Chinoy. “When we got there, she was almost directing us,” Obaid-Chinoy said: “ ‘You should speak to my mother-in-law. At 6 P.M., my husband is going to come after work. Speak to this doctor—he was my first surgeon.’ She had a lot of strength, and wanted us to get the complete story.” After the attack, Saba’s father and uncle were arrested, and Saba had to decide whether to “forgive” them. (By Pakistani law, honor killings can be absolved if the victim, or her family, forgives the perpetrator.) The film follows Saba as she painfully makes the decision to pardon her relatives, pressured by people all around her: her dad, who is unrepentant; male elders in her neighborhood, who insist that she has violated the norms of the community; her mother, who offers sympathy but will not defy her husband’s judgment.

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The film is Obaid-Chinoy’s most visually striking, featuring interview scenes intercut with moody shots of the city. “It’s more sophisticated,” another filmmaker told me. “She let the story tell itself. I think she’s learning that people can hang themselves.” At one point, Obaid-Chinoy interviews Saba’s father through the bars of his jail cell. “Whatever we did, we were obliged to do it,” he says. “Why did she leave home? I labored and earned lawfully to feed her. . . . I have my honor and pride. I couldn’t bear that. If you put one drop of piss in a gallon of milk, the whole thing gets destroyed!”

At the end of the film, Saba reconciles with her mother, and we learn that she is pregnant; she hopes to have a daughter. For Western viewers, it’s a gratifying, redemptive ending. The screenings to packed audiences at the United Nations headquarters and the Asia Society in New York were usually followed by discussions about women’s rights in Pakistan; an article in London’s Independent said that the film “could help bring an end to honour killings in the country.” Obaid-Chinoy won a second Oscar for the documentary in 2016.

But activist filmmakers open themselves to speculations of whether their art succeeds in creating change—a complex determination, in this case. After the Oscar nomination, Obaid-Chinoy said, the topic of honor killings became nightly news in Pakistan. The Prime Minister at the time, Nawaz Sharif, said that he would enact a bill that had been proposed a year earlier, to make honor killing punishable by death or by a sentence of more than a decade in prison, with no possibility of forgiveness, and the film was screened at his office. In October of 2016, the bill became law, although critics note that, in the case of capital punishment, the judge can reduce the sentence if the victim or the victim’s family offers forgiveness. “I mean, filmmakers are not magicians,” Obaid-Chinoy conceded. “I thought, Should I be critical of the government because it watered down the bill, or should I applaud them for passing the bill?” In the end, she chose to “cautiously applaud.”

She later gave a talk about the film at Women in the World, an international conference where attendees pay hundreds of dollars to hear speakers on pressing women’s issues. Onstage, she was interviewed by Cynthia McFadden, an NBC News correspondent. Obaid-Chinoy said, “Saba’s singular voice, the fact that she had the courage to speak out, has changed the law for honor killings in Pakistan.” As the crowd applauded warmly, McFadden responded, “I would say two singular voices, wouldn’t you? Saba’s courage—and your courage, in telling this story.”

The honor-killing legislation was one of several laws passed on the issue at the urging of other prominent Pakistani activists; none of the laws have had much effect on people’s practices. “She’s one of the few Pakistani women who have a say in what is often an entirely white and entirely Western conversation,” Rafia Zakaria, a Pakistani writer, said. “But this trickle-down moral change is never going to happen. So the question becomes, Is your goal to end honor killings, or to participate in the existing global conversation on honor killings? The problem is, at the ground level you’re not changing cultural and social attitudes.” Saba later told reporters that her family were deeply “disturbed” by “A Girl in the River,” and perceived it as another blow to their honor. Last year, Saba left the country with her husband and children.

In 2016, Obaid-Chinoy, hoping to introduce her films and those of others to people who had never been to a movie theatre, started a mobile rural cinema that travels to remote villages. The screenings drew hundreds, but the audience was not always convinced. To Obaid-Chinoy’s dismay, when she screened “A Girl in the River” male viewers often cheered for Saba’s father. (Sometimes she held separate screenings for women inside trailers.) She often surveyed her audiences to see what they had taken from the film. “You have to keep shining a light on things, even if nobody changes their mind while watching the film,” Obaid-Chinoy said. “There will be somebody who will think twice about what a woman goes through, or about killing a woman.”

Still, her critics argue that she aims to please foreign audiences with stories of Eastern backwardness. Jude Chehab, a Lebanese-American filmmaker, told me that Obaid-Chinoy’s work “primarily showed the evils in the region,” and generally fell in line with U.S. foreign policy. “If she were to make a documentary on, let’s say, the U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, would she be as celebrated by the West?” Chehab said. “It just feels like she’s sticking to the same images that everyone already has.” “A Girl in the River,” she believed, should have given its audience a deeper cultural context for honor killings, spending more time with the subjects before delving into the actual crime.

Obaid-Chinoy argues that her work is meant for both Pakistani and Western audiences. People in Pakistan often do express their support. On a flight from Karachi to Islamabad, several men stopped Obaid-Chinoy and offered praise, and, at the Karachi airport, an airline attendant recognized her and waved her through check-in with a smile. Nevertheless, she told me, “we’re a society that brings people down. We don’t celebrate our heroes, we don’t trust the veneer, we throw stones at them.” She mentioned Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by extremists for attending school and became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, whom some Pakistanis criticize for exposing the country’s worst qualities to foreigners. Obaid-Chinoy saw herself as similarly maligned. “Everything in this country is a conspiracy theory,” she said. “So, Sharmeen is successful? It’s because of a Jewish conspiracy, or an Indian conspiracy, or an American conspiracy. Not because she works hard and actually does things that have an impact.” The people who said that she showed only the negative aspects of Pakistan, she went on, were mostly conservative and religious, or “trolls,” who hadn’t bothered to see her work. “Hiding these issues is not going to make them go away,” she said.

Obaid-Chinoy married the Pakistani executive of a manufacturing company in 2005. They live with their children in Defence, not far from where she grew up. Their house, spacious and decorated with the tasteful minimalism of a boutique hotel, is guarded by security, and staffed by two Filipino women who serve as nanny and housekeeper.

Obaid-Chinoy often travels abroad for film projects and for speaking engagements. When she is in Karachi, she is a reluctant but admired presence in the city’s social scene. One evening last August, we left her house and headed downtown for the opening of a new cultural center. She was dressed, as usual, in a black shalwar kameez, and was carrying a blue pebbled-leather tote. Although Obaid-Chinoy often professes to be indifferent to what others think, she takes pains to avoid controversy: she rarely talks about her husband or her family and seldom appears with them in public, and she normally declines interviews with local media. “Everyone is looking at what I’m wearing, what I’m doing, so that they can say I’m a liberal”—too aligned with looser Western morals and values—she said. “I don’t usually like going out at night, because when I look at the pictures next morning I look like crap,” she added, laughing.

The gallery was in a tiny second-floor walkup, with green walls, fairy lights, and a view of the city’s congested historical center. Obaid-Chinoy greeted some journalist and architect friends, and told them about the upcoming opening of the National History Museum, whose holdings had recently been curated by the Citizens Archive of Pakistan—an organization that she helped found and that seeks to preserve a national record through oral history, photographs, and newspaper clippings. “For this one, I don’t need to ask the Americans,” she joked.

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When Obaid-Chinoy was ready to leave, we got back into her car, a sturdy S.U.V. Her escort stood by with his pistol drawn as Obaid-Chinoy entered the vehicle, then took up his post in the front seat. She had increased her security in 2015, after a co-founder of the Citizens Archive, the human-rights activist Sabeen Mahmud, was murdered; at least two other female activists have been killed in Karachi in the past five years. “I do not let any of that deter me, but I would be stupid to say that danger does not lurk,” she said. During my visit, a young employee at the museum had called Obaid-Chinoy as she drove to a shoot, and reported that intelligence agents had stopped by the museum. Obaid-Chinoy erupted. “It’s not subversive activities!” she told the employee. “You cannot give information to the intelligence agencies. I know my rights!”

Obaid-Chinoy’s ambition usually supersedes her worries. Since 2011, she has run SOC Films (the name is taken from her initials), which hires young college graduates to work on creative features and educational films that inform women of their rights where divorce, sexual harassment, property inheritance, and filing police reports are concerned. The company often loses money, but she doesn’t mind. “The goal is breaking even and doing projects that challenge everyone,” she said.

In 2012, Obaid-Chinoy set out to make the country’s first full-length animated film, a superhero movie in which a group of Pakistani kids fight to save their home, the Town of Light, from thugs. She hoped the film would provide children with new, non-Western role models. “Nobody wanted to give me money,” she said. She had to make most of the film, paying for it herself, before investors would commit funds. The film, called “Three Brave Ones,” came out in 2015 and was a commercial success in Pakistan; a sequel was released the following year. Obaid-Chinoy now directs an animation studio, the first one in the country to be run by a woman. Her lead producer, Kamran Khan, who is in his thirties and wears graphic T-shirts, said that former colleagues discouraged him from working there, complaining about the villainous men in Obaid-Chinoy’s films and claiming that she didn’t even live in the country. “I’ve never seen a woman like her in Pakistan,” he said. “I don’t know when she sleeps.” This year, HBO Films will release a documentary, co-directed by Obaid-Chinoy, on the financial exploitation of college athletes, which she describes as “the dream of college education and college sports, and the reality.”

A few of Obaid-Chinoy’s friends wonder if she will eventually run for office. “She now sees herself as having the back of all women in Pakistan,” Masoomeh Hilal told me. During my visit, a female member of Parliament, Ayesha Gulalai, accused the Pakistani politician and former professional cricketer Imran Khan of sexual harassment. (He has denied the claim.) Public opinion was virulently against her; she was called a liar and a gold digger. Obaid-Chinoy seemed to take the affair personally. “The benefit of the doubt in this country is always given to a man,” she said.

The Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif has agreed that criticism of Obaid-Chinoy reflects the patriarchal outlook that permeates Pakistani society. “Even in these educated circles, men, at best, are patronizing about women,” he said. “Sharmeen’s work should be available in Pakistan for a wider audience, and then we can have a debate about the merits of her work. Here people are quick to judge her as a panderer without actually watching her work, out of misplaced ideas of nationalism and national honor. Otherwise, it’s just like saying, ‘Sharmeen is so ambitious.’ Well, show me a filmmaker who isn’t.”

On the afternoon that Obaid-Chinoy visited the addiction clinic in Peshawar, she joined Parveen Azam Khan, the doctor who opened the center, in 1993, as she travelled to another clinic. Today, she runs several facilities that provide free treatment. Khan, who is seventy-nine, has an elegant bearing and an assured manner of speaking that suggests that she is unaccustomed to being interrupted. Obaid-Chinoy was interviewing her for a book project on “grassroots heroes”; she had profiled Khan before, for a series on community leaders that she made for Pakistani TV. SOC describes one of these projects—the six-part “Ho Yaqeen,” or “To Have Faith”—as an attempt to tell “the stories of individuals who have spearheaded efforts for a brighter Pakistan.”

In the interview with Khan, Obaid-Chinoy needed to elicit a scene that would personalize the issue of drug addiction. According to the United Nations, Pakistan has among the highest rates of heroin addiction in the world. But people often remain silent about drug use, even when it affects family and friends. This afternoon, Obaid-Chinoy had something particular in mind. She told me that Khan’s two sons had both died mysteriously at the age of twenty-nine, ten years apart.

“Dr. Parveen,” Obaid-Chinoy said. “You’ve been doing this for a very long time. Is there anything in any of the clinics, any story, that has a very dramatic arc to it? You know, there was some addiction, recovery, and some sort of resolution.”

Khan was evasive. Many people came through the clinic, she said, and while it was hard to keep track of all the patients, it had been rewarding to help them. Obaid-Chinoy urged her to be more specific. “Out of all the children . . .” Khan said, and thought for a moment. “Their stories are all very touching and very motivating. I can’t think of any special one.”

Obaid-Chinoy reminded her of a boy, abandoned by his family because he was H.I.V.-positive, who left the clinic and became a drug dealer.

“Oh, yes,” Khan said. “We tried to bring him back into treatment, but he refused. He said, ‘I have no life, anyhow, so, this way, I feel very important, and I’m looking after myself.’ We’re still working on him.” She returned to broader concerns. “Eighty per cent of the global opiates come from Afghanistan, and it’s a very porous border,” she said. “We just can’t seem to stop it.”

“I completely understand the geopolitics,” Obaid-Chinoy said. “But as somebody who has devoted her life to rehabilitating anyone who has been affected by drugs—this boy came in, he spent time, you tried to reconcile him with his family. Not only did he go back on the streets but he became a drug dealer. How does that make you feel? Does that make you feel a little hopeless?”

“The fact that he was H.I.V.-positive made things more complicated,” Khan said, in the tone of a clinician consulting her notes. “But, again, we have so many like this.”

The car turned onto a street densely edged with trees. In the dappled light, Khan suddenly began to talk about her sons. They were “handsome, brilliant,” she said softly. “My sons had everything in life—they had the best of education.” She was silent for a moment. “You can’t dwell on it, because it’s too painful. This work is the only way I can deal with life.”

As we neared the clinic, another question occurred to Obaid-Chinoy. “Do you think that, while you’re saving people, they’re also saving you?” she asked.

“You’re so right,” Khan said. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 9, 2018, issue, with the headline “Daughter of Pakistan.”